All, indeed, seemed peace and harmony. Even the Protestants, who were rather numerous in the diocese and in all that part of France, had a friendly word from the new Bishop on his arrival. One of the speeches which has been preserved was addressed to the crowd in the street. After telling them how much he valued their joyful faces and cries of welcome, he added, “I know there are those in this company who are divided from us as to belief; in spite of which, I hope we may be united in affection, and I will do all that is possible to bring this to pass.” Here one seems to see the germ of that idea of religious toleration which influenced Richelieu’s policy in later years. If he could persuade the Huguenots to be “Frenchmen first and Protestants afterwards,” he was always willing to give them liberty of worship. If he crushed them, it was because they were a fighting faction which endangered, in his view, the unity of France and the power of the monarchy. From his dilapidated palace, the heavy old buildings of which leaned up against cathedral walls battered by wars and by weather, Richelieu wrote in the spring of 1609 to a certain Madame de Bourges, who lived in Paris, in the Rue des Blanc-manteaux, near the newly fashionable Place Royale. This lady seems to have been a friend of his mother’s family, and to have been married to one of a succession of distinguished physicians who practised in Paris during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was certainly an obliging person. Possibly her husband or son had attended the young Bishop in his four months’ illness. He begins his letter by thanking Madame de Bourges for a million kindnesses, and especially for some ecclesiastical vestments she had sent him. He found himself badly off for many necessary ornaments, former bishops of Luçon having left little behind them. And no wonder: they had not made it their residence for sixty years, we are told, and fighting Huguenots had stormed and devastated the place. “... I am now in my barony,” he writes, “beloved of everybody, so they tell me, and I can only repeat it; but you know all beginnings are good. I shall have no lack of occupation here, I assure you, for everything is in such ruins that repairing will be hard work. I am extremely ill-lodged, for I have no fire anywhere, because of the smoke ... no remedy but patience. I assure you that I have the most horrid bishopric in France, the most muddy and the most disagreeable.... There is no place to walk, no garden, no alley, no anything, so that I am imprisoned in my house....” He is immensely interested in his furniture and his household, showing in these young days all the taste for careful detail, all the love of magnificence and show, which was to characterise the great Minister, the man with millions to spend where a poor little Bishop of Luçon had only hundreds.